Arch Linux

renaudbus

Member

Registered: 2015-03-29

Posts: 10

error: only one operation may be used at a time

Hello,

My pacman is lock. If I do, for example,

sudo pacman -Syu

, it gives me: "error: only one operation may be used at a time".

I notice I can still use "yay" to query and install packages.

Do you have any clue how I can fix this?

Thanks for your support

teckk

Member

Registered: 2013-02-21

Posts: 524

Re: error: only one operation may be used at a time

Do you have an instance of pacman already running?

Look at 3.3
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman

astralc

Member

Registered: 2022-09-17

Posts: 90

Re: error: only one operation may be used at a time

That error is shown when you combine pacman operations - the "capital" options like: -S, -Q, -R, -F, -U

maybe you put some other 'pacman' in the path?
check output of

type pacman

and you can try full path to see if it work:

sudo /usr/bin/pacman -Syu

mountaintrek

Member

Registered: 2024-02-01

Posts: 36

Re: error: only one operation may be used at a time

Anything in the pacman log? Perhaps it might indicate an issue with a particular package.

less +G /var/log/pacman.log

renaudbus

Member

Registered: 2015-03-29

Posts: 10

Re: error: only one operation may be used at a time

Hello,

Thanks all for your support, with your help I found the problem, I had an erroneous Bash alias. In my ".bashrc" file I had written:

if [ $UID -ne 0 ]; then
  alias pacman='sudo pacman -Syu'
fi

But the "-Syu" shouldn't have been "hard coded" there.

Thanks again.